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The Joy of Painting, Text Mining, World War I, More: Friday Buzz, March 17, 2017

Found via Reddit: someone created a Bob Ross / ‘The Joy of Painting’ episodes database. 403 episodes are listed, with some available via the official Bob Ross YouTube channel. You can even search the paintings by color. I find the headline font a bit irritating, but otherwise it’s really nicely done.

Archives.gov has released a new “Remembering World War I” app. “The app invites people nationwide to contribute their own stories and play a part in the centennial commemoration of the First World War. Building on an amazing moving image and photographic archive being digitized and preserved as part of a larger Wartime Films Project, the app features thousands of rarely seen public domain images and films to encourage discovery and creative reuse. Intended in part for classroom instruction, Remembering WWI provides educators with the digital sources and narrative-building tools to help students foster an understanding of World War I.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

MakeUseOf: Google’s New App Turns Your Words Into Emojis . “Google’s startup incubator, Area 120, has released a new app called Supersonic. This follows hot on the heels of Uptime, an app designed to let you watch YouTube videos with friends. Supersonic is yet another messaging app, but one that does something interesting with emojis.”

CNET: Twitter, Turner and CBS Sports launch NCAA pregame show. “Twitter is teaming up with Turner Sports and CBS Sports to stream a 30-minute pregame show focusing on college basketball fans’ take on the NCAA Tournament on the social network. The show, NCAA March Madness Now, will begin on Thursday and Friday on Twitter featuring game predictions, celebrity tweets, fan polls and office pools.”

USEFUL STUFF

This sounds useful if you like to follow finance news. From TheNextWeb: CityFalcon is like Feedly for money – and it’s awesome. “I’ve made it my goal for 2017 to read more finance news. The problem is knowing where to look. There are hundreds (if not thousands) of money-oriented blogs, websites, and twitter feeds, with some more reliable than others. Enter CityFalcon.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

Economic Times: France keen to speed up Indo-French library digitisation project. “France is keen to speed up the Indo-French project aimed at digitising and archiving old documents and manuscripts stored in major libraries in the two countries. Although the project was officially initiated a few months ago, it has not been able to gain momentum due to logistics constraints, Damien Syed, French Consul General at Kolkata told ET. ‘Now our government is keen to speed it up,’ he said.”

The Guardian: Guardian pulls ads from Google after they were placed next to extremist material. “The Guardian has withdrawn all its online advertising from Google and YouTube after it emerged that its ads were being inadvertently placed next to extremist material. Ads for the Guardian’s membership scheme are understood to have been placed alongside a range of extremist material after an agency acting on the media group’s behalf used Google’s AdX ad exchange.”

Backchannel: Google Fiber Was Doomed From the Start. “Look, Google was never going to fix the nation’s high-capacity internet access problem. It’s a problem with several dimensions: In most major urban areas, local cable monopolies dominate completely, selling high-priced, second-rate data services that are inextricably bundled with pay TV packages and unthreatened by competition. In rural areas, former telco monopolies are doing their best to transform themselves into wireless media distribution platforms, cutting off millions of Americans from the modern world by relegating them to third- or fourth-rate unreliable data services.”

SECURITY/LEGAL ISSUES

Wait, what? Citypages: Edina police ask for whole city’s Google searches, and a judge says yes. “As detailed in a report from Tony Webster earlier this week, a Hennepin County judge has granted the Edina Police Department an extraordinary degree of access to citizens’ Google history, as cops attempt to crack the case of an attempted wire transfer fraud.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

University of Maryland: How to Detect Fake Facebook Friends. “Company pages on social media sites like Facebook contain real-time information for brand managers hoping to gauge customer sentiment, but only if they know how to make sense of the raw data. New research from the University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business shows how to filter for bias, starting with a three-pronged test to identify and remove fake users.”

Ars Technica: Microsoft’s silence over unprecedented patch delay doesn’t smell right. “Patch Tuesday has occurred regularly for more than 13 years. During that time, it has never been canceled, although one former Microsoft security boss, in a now-deleted Tweet, reported there were one or more close calls. And in fairness to Microsoft, the cancellation may have been related to company’s recent move to make updates cumulative, meaning they’re tested for bugs only on systems that install the entire package. That might cause a problem with a single patch to scuttle the entire release.But even if the cancellation was for the most banal of reasons, Microsoft’s silence is just wrong.” Good morning, Internet..

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